I think it's pretty telling that there are lots of letters like this from Microsoft, but almost none from Apple.
I can't imagine someone from Apple writing a letter like this to Jobs and still working at Apple.
“I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft” (2004)
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Re: “I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft” (2004)
#82I think the context of this occurring during Longhorn (LH) development is important. For anyone that doesn't know Longhorn[1] was the precursor to Vista. They tried to do a lot of big things but it dragged on for years before they had to recalibrate, abandon a lot of ideas, and ship Vista. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Windows_Vista
Interesting how basically the same thing happened to Apple in the 90s: the original, more radical successor to System 7 was in development for years under the name Copland, before they ended up scrapping most of it and releasing the much more conservative MacOS 8. Although I guess the only real takeaway might be that OS development is hard.
Re: “I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft” (2004)
#83Back around Vista time I went to watch a talk by one of MS's UI designers about all the time and effort they'd put into designing the Vista interface. He gave a demo showing a walk-through of some set-up "wizard" and talked about all the details he thought were important. At no point did he mention the fact that depending on which screen you were on the "next" and "previous" buttons would swap places with the "cancel…
Sometimes my work-issued Macbook decides that it no longer wants to display an escape key on the touch bar (and there is no physical escape key). People joke about not knowing how to exit vi, but it turns out the game is even harder when your machine takes away your escape key!
Remap caps lock to escape.
Re: “I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft” (2004)
#84I think it's pretty telling that there are lots of letters like this from Microsoft, but almost none from Apple. I can't imagine someone from Apple writing a letter like this to Jobs and still working at Apple.
I agree, but seemingly that hasn't mattered or helped much? Apple is a more valuable company in terms of market cap, and almost certainly a more 'loved' company in terms of mindshare.
Many people thought they'd be doomed without Jobs but they've seemingly been doing just fine still (ignoring many valid criticisms here, of course, but talking about the general population).
Which I really find fascinating. Aside from their arguably better stance on privacy, I don't really find there's much at all to love about Apple products beyond they look quite nice, generally. In fact I actively dislike a lot of the way they dumb down interfaces, but I acknowledge that's something the vast majority of users won't ever care about.
Is that really all there is to it? The consistency of aesthetic is enough to win? I've always found it to be an interesting question, why they continue to be so successful.
Re: “I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft” (2004)
#85I think it's pretty telling that there are lots of letters like this from Microsoft, but almost none from Apple. I can't imagine someone from Apple writing a letter like this to Jobs and still working at Apple.
Apple did not have it's internal emails made public and discussed in court. I think the email we're discussing was part of the anti-trust investigation against Microsoft.
Re: “I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft” (2004)
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sometimes my work-issued Macbook decides that it no longer wants to display an escape key on the touch bar (and there is no physical escape key). People joke about not knowing how to exit vi, but it turns out the game is even harder when your machine takes away your escape key!
Remap caps lock to escape.
Yeah, I strongly considered that last time it happened. Eventually I was able to fix it by restarting a few processes related to the touchbar, and decided to leave well enough alone for fear of breaking something else. I think if it starts happening more frequently, I'll remap it.
Re: “I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft” (2004)
#87MacOS was starting to get good in 2004, but unfortunately I feel that it went to their head. My opinion of MacOS didn't really start to decline until Catalina, at which point it started to become blatantly obvious that Apple was focused more on "business" than "computers" these days. I was surprisingly content with the openness of Mojave, and even hopeful for the future of the OS. If any slivers of hope were hanging on during Catalina, they were certainly demolished when they showed off the Big Sur redesign.
Re: “I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft” (2004)
#88I think it's pretty telling that there are lots of letters like this from Microsoft, but almost none from Apple. I can't imagine someone from Apple writing a letter like this to Jobs and still working at Apple.
I agree, but seemingly that hasn't mattered or helped much? Apple is a more valuable company in terms of market cap, and almost certainly a more 'loved' company in terms of mindshare. Many people thought they'd be doomed without Jobs but they've seemingly been doing just fine still (ignoring many valid criticisms here, of course, but talking about the general population). Which I really find fascinating. Aside from t…
Just to take a recent HN front page example, the link to SyncThing. It says "Since Android phones, at least, are Linux-based, one need only set up a normal shell environment on it and put Syncthing there to achieve this goal; the process shouldn't take more than a day or so."
The disconnect between the two worlds "people who use Apple products" and "people who think a day or so of your life is a reasonable amount of time to install an app that copies files over a network" is, well there's no way to cross that gap. And then you describe what Apple does as "dumbing down", for dumb people. People who don't want to care that SyncThing is written in Go instead of Java which means they can't access the Android API to write to an SD Card and the docs lead to a Github issue with 128 comments explaining why they aren't going to fix it. People who give their iCloud account login and Apple has their photos? Dumb people.
[I know people choose SyncThing to keep control locally and that often comes at a cost of more trouble, more effort. It's illustrative of very different worlds, that's all].
Re: “I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft” (2004)
#89Back around Vista time I went to watch a talk by one of MS's UI designers about all the time and effort they'd put into designing the Vista interface. He gave a demo showing a walk-through of some set-up "wizard" and talked about all the details he thought were important. At no point did he mention the fact that depending on which screen you were on the "next" and "previous" buttons would swap places with the "cancel…
Sometimes my work-issued Macbook decides that it no longer wants to display an escape key on the touch bar (and there is no physical escape key). People joke about not knowing how to exit vi, but it turns out the game is even harder when your machine takes away your escape key!
Thankfully they gave us back the physical escape key in the next version! I had the version you're using for 3 years as a work issued machine. Between the touchbar and the butterfly keyboard repeatedly failing on me it was pretty bad.
Re: “I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft” (2004)
#90I love the backpedalling later about how great Vista is. Which was bollocks.
I disagree. Vista did have some problems, but this was because it introduced SuperCache (which worked in a way that did not match everyone's expectations), a new strategy for file copies (that didn't work better in a lot of cases), a new display server, and new driver models for networking, sound, and video in user space. Vista is when we stopped having to reboot for changing the video driver, where a sound driver cr…
Vista changed the driver model (for the best), and some manufacturer quite simply never bothered to upgrade.